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Acting for reasons, apt action, and knowledge

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Abstract

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief.

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Notes

  1. Williamson, for example, makes a very insightful comparison of knowledge and successful action, calling knowledge the “reverse counterpart” of action (Williamson 2000, p. 2). An important difference is that he is concerned with action that successfully satisfies desire, not with action that is favored by a normative reason. However, it is notable that Williamson’s account and mine nevertheless point in the same direction despite the fact that they rest on very different accounts of knowledge. Williamson does not even share the view that knowledge is justified true belief with an anti-Gettier component. The similarities between action and knowledge seem to be visible from very different perspectives.

  2. Note that I am here concerned with how philosophers might want to use this technical phrase for different philosophical purposes. I am not directly concerned with how the colloquial expression ‘doing something for a (good) reason’ is used in everyday talk. That expression may have only one usage.

  3. The distinction between acting for a reason and acting merely in accordance with a reason can be traced back to Kant’s distinction between acting “aus Pflicht” and “pflichtgemäß”, Kant (1785/6, B, pp. 397–400).

  4. Distinguish two senses in which a consideration can be said to favor the action from the agent’s perspective, either of which might fit the subjective notion. The agent might represent something as a normative reason by a normative belief. Or the agent might represent something as a descriptive fact by, e.g., a descriptive belief, where the content is such that there would be a reason if the representation was true. The descriptive representation might as well be a non-conceptual representation, e.g., a perception.

  5. The idea that acting for a reason in this subjective sense reflects well on the agent’s character is found, e.g., in Setiya (2007), Markovits (2010), and Hurka (2001), and, of course, Kant (1785/6), where it is put in terms of the “moral worth of an action”. It is controversial whether it reflects better on the agent’s character to act for an explicitly normative consideration or for a descriptive consideration that is, de facto, normative. Compare, e.g., Arpaly (2003) and Williams (1981).

  6. The subject might have a false non-normative belief, a false normative belief, or both.

  7. There are different dispositions that are dispositions to appropriate motivation. There needs to be an exercise of one such disposition, but it need not be the same in every instance of acting for a normative reason. For example, normative and descriptive representations will require different dispositions.

  8. This symbol is supposed to stand for either a descriptive representation of an apparent fact or a representation of something as a reason, i.e., a normative representation.

  9. Some authors propose a weaker sense in which acting for a reason is factive by saying that such action is performed for a true consideration or a fact, whether or not that fact favors the action (e.g., Unger 1975; Hyman 1999). My notion is stronger; it implies that there is a normative reason, not only a fact.

  10. It is possible to think of different, more detailed, descriptions of dispositions to represent a reason when there really is one. For descriptive representations, usual ways of belief formation, e.g., via sense perception, can be filled in. For an account of how to form a normative representation of a reason, a special epistemology for normative entities needs to be filled in.

  11. I explore this notion for systematic reasons and in order to contrast it with the explanatory notion. I will not rely on the appropriateness of the conjunctive notion in the following.

  12. It is not easy to say how exactly competences and dispositions are related generally. I am inclined to think that every competence C to do X that I have under conditions C’ just is a certain disposition D (or a set of dispositions) to do X under conditions D’. What is important, if we are to identify competence C with disposition D, is that the conditions C’ under which someone has the competence sometimes are different ones than the conditions D’ under which he is disposed to do X. Therefore it is no counterexample to the view that competences are dispositions that I have the competence to cut my hair under conditions where I have a pair of scissors and control over my arms even if I am not disposed to cut my hair under these conditions. The competence to cut my hair, which I have under conditions where I have a pair of scissors and control over my arms, will plausibly be the disposition to cut my hair if I intend to, whereas I have the competence to cut my hair even if I do not intend to cut it.

  13. The competence to act in accordance with normative reasons involves being influenced not just by any kind of fact but, more specifically, by normative reasons qua their normative character. This is why I prefer a more demanding account of acting for a normative reason than, e.g., Alvarez (2010), Hyman (1999), and Unger (1975). This is why my account implies that something actually favors the action.

  14. A similar view is put forward in Greco (2010).

  15. The exercise of the competence affects the arrow’s initial speed and direction, and these cause, together with the winds, the arrow to hit where it does. Consequently, in a sense, the exercise of the competence does enter into a certain kind of explanation of the result of the shot, namely a causal one. But it does not do so qua competence, and the explanation of a success in the form described in Fig. 5 (which is explanation by competence qua competence) is thus prevented.

  16. The expression ‘reliable enough’ indicates that the ratio of success that counts as reliable is dependent on the competence in question and need not always be considerably high. For example, certain kinds of very difficult sports might require only that a person has success in twenty percent of her performances for that person to be very competent in that sport.

  17. For the importance of competence conditions, or, as Sosa calls them, “appropriate conditions”, see, e.g., Sosa (2007, pp. 28–33, 81–84).

  18. Note that the success may in such a case have to be attributed to the circumstances and not to the agent even though the state that is successful is caused, in part, by the agent’s exercising the competence (and, for the other part, by the freaky conditions). This will come out in Sosa’s discussion of the Gettier example that I cite below.

  19. In other contexts, the expression ‘truth apt belief’ refers to belief that can be either true or false. Sosa’s notion of aptness is a technical notion he stipulates and differs significantly from the notion of aptness that is used in those contexts. Throughout this article, I use only Sosa’s notion of aptness. By ‘truth apt belief’ I mean belief that is true because of epistemic competence, not belief that merely can be either true or false.

  20. For an analysis of epistemic competences as dispositions, see Sosa (2011, pp. 80–85, 2009, p. 135).

  21. For a criticism of the idea that every instance of knowledge implies credit, see Lackey (2007).

  22. According to some epistemologists, e.g., Dretske, knowledge does not require justification. See Dretske (1981, 1971). Instead of justification, some other factor is postulated, such as “conclusive reasons” or “information basedness”. It is unclear, however, whether one could not count such a factor as amounting to justification.

  23. For the view that this is not possible, see Williamson (2000).

  24. One might wonder how, literally, the truth of a belief can be explained by the competence. Should one not rather say that the formation of a belief that is true is explained by the competence? However, it is crucial for Sosa’s theory that the success and not the mere formation of the belief is explained by the competence (see the Sosa quote below). Maybe worries about this kind of explanation can be overcome if the explanation of a belief’s truth is viewed as corresponding to a specific kind of explanation of the formation of the belief. In Sect. 5 I spell out a bridge principle that states such a correspondence.

  25. I cannot discuss in full how Sosa deals with the Gettier problem in general, because he handles cases that do not involve false belief differently. One such example is the barn façade example, see Sosa (2007, p. 96, fn. 1, 2004, pp. 292–293). Sosa’s strategy is to ascribe knowledge in the barn façade example. Greco responds to the barn façade example in a more satisfactory way by claiming that it is dependent on context which competence is called for and whether the belief is apt with respect to that competence (Greco 2010, pp. 76-80). When context requires the competence to distinguish between barns and fake barns, Greco does not ascribe knowledge. For a discussion of the barn façade case as a challenge for Virtue Epistemology and another proposal how to react to this challenge, see Pritchard (2010).

  26. An appeal to certain sub-competences can be found in a passage in Sosa’s work, namely, in his discussion of perception, see Sosa (2011, pp. 74–78). However, Sosa does not generally assign sub-competences the importance that I think they have.

  27. A false belief as such does not imply that the exercise of competence did not take place under competence conditions. Even under competence conditions competences are only reliable, not infallible. Even under competence conditions they can produce false belief.

  28. Why not simply demand that all outputs of sub-competences be successful and apt? To demand success of sub-competence is, in inferential reasoning, to exclude inferences from false beliefs. But Warfield argues that there is knowledge from falsehood. These are exactly the cases in which the output of the sub-competence, despite being false, is close enough to the truth to qualify as good enough input for the overall-competence to work reliably enough.

  29. I borrow this example from Christian Piller’s inspiring talk at the conference “Knowledge, Virtue, Action” in 2010.

  30. The idea that there need not be any normative reason that favors the action when the action is intention apt is challenged by the view that the mere fact that the action succeeds in attaining what an agent intends (i.e. that the action is intention accurate) does itself favor the action. This view yields that there is always at least one reason that favors an intention apt action, namely, the reason that it is intention accurate. I do not endorse this view because to me it seems implausible that there be at least one thing that favors that the archer intentionally shoots a child on a playground, namely that it is what he intends to do. But even if this view could be defended, this would not threaten my main point: that intention aptness is different from normative aptness. Even if intention aptness implied normative aptness in the weak sense with respect to an intention-reason of the agent, it would not imply normative aptness (in the weak sense) with respect to certain other reasons, such as the normative reason that the child do well. Normative aptness can accommodate standards of success that can be independent of the agent’s intention, whereas intention aptness cannot.

  31. It is an interesting question whether normative reasons are totally independent of what an agent intends, or to what extent they depend upon intentions. I do not mean to exclude the possibility that sometimes an agent’s intention gives rise to a normative reason. All I want to say is that the standard is not to attain what the agent intends, as such, but to act in accordance with a normative reason—whether this reason relies on or is constituted by an intention is a different question. In what follows, this will be the sense I have in mind.

  32. The idea that intentional action constitutively aims at the good is rejected, e.g., in Stocker (1979), Velleman (1992) and Setiya (2007).

  33. For example, the competence to pump blood aims at pumping blood Sosa (2007, p. 23).

  34. For a different view, see Kiesewetter (2011).

  35. Another version of Virtue Epistemology is developed in Zagzebski (1996) and Fairweather (2001).

  36. This view is made especially clear in Setiya (2007), but something close to it (namely that virtues are dispositions to respond to values) can be found also, e.g., in Hurka (2001, 2011).

  37. A virtue ethicist may say that the virtuous action is favored by normative reasons because it is virtuous and not that it is virtuous because it is favored by normative reasons. I am neutral on that. But a virtue ethicist will surely see a closer connection between virtues and normative reasons than between virtues and attaining whatever one intends, as in the example of the archer intending to shoot a child at a playground.

  38. “A virtuous performance, whether a correct belief due to intellectual virtue or a right action due to practical virtue, will involve both the agent’s constitution and his situation” (Sosa 2007, p. 81).

  39. Requirement (2) could also be expressed as follows: (1) holds also for all outputs of exercise of sub-competences that are involved in the exercose of the competence.

  40. For the view that acting for a reason involves knowledge of that reason, compare Unger (1975, pp. 200–211), Hyman (1999), and Hornsby (2008, pp. 250–252). My account of acting for a normative reason differs from their accounts in that they primarily focus on acting intentionally for a known fact, and not so much on whether that fact really favors the action and whether the agent exercises the competence to respond to this normative dimension in particular.

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Acknowledgments

I especially want to thank Christoph Fehige, Heinz-Dieter Heckmann, Tim Henning, Frank Hofmann, Rob McGee, Oliver Petersen, Christian Piller, Eva Schmidt, Thomas Schmidt, Peter Schulte, David Schweikard, Michael Smith, Ernest Sosa, Ulla Wessels, and two anonymous referees for comments and inspiration. I also want to thank the audiences of talks I gave at the Universität des Saarlandes in 2011, at the XXI. German Congress of Philosophy in Munich in 2011, and at a meeting at the island Reichenau, Germany, in the same year for very illuminating discussions of this paper.

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Mantel, S. Acting for reasons, apt action, and knowledge. Synthese 190, 3865–3888 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0230-8

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